In the past, software architectures have attempted to deal with increasing levels of software complexity. As the level of complexity continues to increase, traditional architectures are reaching the limit of their ability to deal with various problems. At the same time, traditional needs of information technology (IT) organizations persist. IT organizations need to respond quickly to new requirements of the business, while continuing to reduce the cost of IT to the business by absorbing and integrating new business partners, new business sets, etc.
Current IT lifecycle processes are configured to managing self-contained and siloed solutions. However, as businesses transition to service oriented architectures (SOA), traditional IT governance methods are inadequate at managing SOA shared services during their entire lifecycle. SOA is not a self-contained and siloed solution; rather it's a decomposition of solutions into a set of shared services. It is these SOA shared services that require a new lifecycle management system, which takes into consideration multiple new processes that are not available or part of existing IT governance systems.